Land, Life, and Resistance: Challenging Green Colonialism and Extractivism

As climate change intensifies, states, corporations, and international institutions increasingly promote market-based responses that often reproduce social and environmental inequalities. Decarbonization efforts, including renewable energy megaprojects, conservation initiatives, carbon markets, and green technologies, are frequently presented as pathways to sustainability. Yet experiences across the globe, particularly in marginalized regions, show that these interventions often depend on dispossession, extraction, and resource grabbing. Rooted in enduring colonial and racialized power relations, they can generate new environmental conflicts while deepening existing forms of marginalization.

This session examines the concept of green colonialism and its usefulness for understanding contemporary socio-environmental transformations, including the energy transition, critical mineral extraction, and new forms of enclosure. We invite contributions that explore how sustainability agendas, climate policies, and environmental governance intersect with colonial legacies, settler and internal colonialism, racial capitalism, and uneven development. We are particularly interested in research that analyzes how affected communities experience, contest, and reimagine alternative pathways.

Possible themes include renewable energy and extractivism; critical minerals and the energy transition; conservation and protected areas; carbon markets and climate finance; Indigenous sovereignty and land defense; environmental justice and decolonial theory; green grabbing and dispossession; more-than-human politics; anti-extractivist movements; and alternative ecological futures.

By bringing together scholars from diverse regions and theoretical traditions, the session seeks to advance critical debates on the tensions between global sustainability agendas and local experiences of environmental injustice, while highlighting forms of resistance, solidarity, and knowledge production emerging from communities confronting the uneven impacts of the green transition.